Leaving the underground 3 - by Joshua Omoijiade

So far in this three-part essay, young Geleck has been from hell to the open; I would not be surprised to find relief in the reader’s mind. One might think of his life as partly or fully liberated; some might be expecting some showdown with his father or the eventual freedom he might extend to his mother after she was so taken advantage of. I am not opposed to the interpretations that follow in my readers’ minds. I will, however, say that not a soul in the story I have made is free. The essence of this third passage is to explain why. <img src="/media/inline_insight_image/1000039076.jpg" alt="">The biases of my world are not hidden; it intentionally stresses points that might only become clearer when taken to extremes. This is a world where many are born in chains. An order of men and women lives above ground in power, controlling the goings-on of the tunnels beneath them. Some imprisoned will never see the sky or feel the winds as Geleck did, and not all of them will get to rescue their family members from the pits. It is obvious why I would describe the underground as full of imprisoned people, but you might wonder why I would conceive of officers such as Baron and Ben as anything less than free. These men come and go as they please, and they impose their power on the inmates. They give and take freedoms, don’t they?  Not so. Freedom is rooted in the ability to make choices. A choice can only be free if we can decide not to choose it. In a simple decision of where to stand in a room - if you could pick any where at all without recourse, or even choose not to stand in that room at all - one could describe the choice of where to stand as a free one. What I am referring to in these essays, however, is a more complex framing of freedom; the freedom that men are inalienably born with in the first place, available to all beings at the onset of existence. Take Geleck, for example; he can choose to stay above ground as a guard, go back to imprisonment, or die. None of these is a free choice. To decide even to stay up as a guard, Geleck makes a choice he could not have otherwise rejected. This choice then frames his life and everyone else’s in the story. The guards are, firstly, not free because they might have had to choose this at one point in their own lives. Even if they are born above ground to higher-class lives and are provided with more liberty, they nevertheless cannot decide to be anything else.The master in creating a slave and a world requiring slaves, cements his place as master. The officers could not choose to be anything other than the oppressors of the underground any more than Geleck could choose. <img src="/media/inline_insight_image/1000039077.jpg" alt="">Furthermore, their world perpetually confines them to these roles, creating an unending cycle. It is tempting to say the guards are free because they have mroe choices than anyone else or maybe you think the upper Stateswomen are more free than someone taken advantage of like Geleck’s mother; but they are in a world where their freedom is erected on the backs of others and creates more ill-liberties and so binding them too. If to escape jail, you simply pass on your chains, the freedom is still tainted. The world that makes it necessary to be a slaver or a bystander to slavery, to be free, is a world that is not free for anyone. Freedom is not divisible in this way: as long as the freedoms of one part of the world rely in some way on the trapping of another part, the roles remain rigid and unfree. This is in part, why Jean-Jacques rousseau said: “But when I see [barbarous man] sacrifice pleasures, repose, wealth, power, and life itself for the preservation of this sole good which is so disdained by those who have lost it; when I see animals born free and despising captivity break their heads against the bars of their prison; when I see multitudes of entirely naked savages scorn European voluptuousness and endure hunger, fire, the sword, and death to preserve only their independence, I feel it does not behoove slaves to reason about freedom” Here, Rousseau establishes that freedom is innate to living creatures. He even talks about the contrast between the untamed stallion, that bristles his mane, strikes the earth with his hoof, and struggles impetuously at the very approach of a bit, while a trained horse patiently endures the whip and the spur. The men in Europe welcome the chains of their guarded lives without detecting it as a cage. Much like Ben and Baron could not conceive their lack of liberty, but it is to be expected; it isn’t required of slaves (who do not know they are slaves) to reason about freedom.  To conclude, I believe it is important to extend the imagination of what freedom really is, because in many positions of life, it can be easy to think that once you secure your escape, you have somehow become a free person, or that your liberty might be bought even at the expense of others. It can also be conceived that you are alone in shackles and that one day you will get a chance to play the role of king, slaver or master, if not accomplice, but there is no real partiality in liberty, the whip strikes both ways.

Leaving The Underground